Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

 

Retired Bible Professor,

Bob Jones University

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What Church Is For, Part 1: Grow Up

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“Experts” tell us that we can’t be productive or successful without goals. We should write down our daily, weekly, monthly, and annual goals, and check them off when they’re completed. We should constantly re-evaluate our goals to be sure that they match our priorities.

In Ephesians 4 God gives His goals for the church. Church isn’t just something we go to as spectators, a place where we meet people and perform rituals. It’s a living organization with a specific mission. In this passage God lays out his goals for the organization of which He is chief executive officer.

He says first that he has given to the church all different kinds of people (Ep 4.11), who by their diversity, and consequent interdependence, will enable one another to minister effectively (Ep 4.12), which in turn will bring the whole body to maturity.

His first goal is pretty straightforward: he wants us to grow up. He measures that growth in two ways (Ep 4.13).

First, he says, we “attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God.” “The faith” is the doctrinal teaching of the Scripture; the church should be a teaching institution, and while some of us should be there to teach, all of us should be there to learn. Do you arrive at the services of the church each Sunday with that goal in mind? Do you lean into the teaching and preaching (and conversations in the hallways) with the intention of hearing and learning what the Bible says and how you should apply it?

But Paul doesn’t leave this merely an academic exercise; we also need to grow in our knowledge of Christ. Of course that means learning facts; you interact with friends and loved ones based on facts you have come to know about them over the years. But we all know that relationship is about more than facts. There’s a personal side, and an emotional side, and a volitional side; you want to be with the person, and you love being there.

And that changes how you live. Over the years I’ve learned that there are certain things my wife doesn’t like—things that I used to do comfortably and routinely before I knew her. I don’t do those things anymore. And I don’t miss them. I value my relationship with my wife more than I value those things.

Similarly I learn about Christ from the teaching and preaching at church, and from conversations with other believers. But I also learn about him by being around my fellow travelers and watching them, consciously or subconsciously. We share our relationships with Christ with one another, and we all grow closer to him.

Next, Paul says that we “attain to mature manhood,” and specifically “to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” Commentators are divided on just how we should translate this phrase, but I would suggest that it is not “until we measure up to Christ,” or “until we’re as tall as Christ,” but rather, “until we show how tall Christ is.” I take that from later in the passage, where Paul says that the church is the body, and Christ is the head (Ep 4.15-16). If someone’s head is much too large for his body, the image can be grotesque. Our job is to grow as a body until we’re just the right size for the head, so that the overall picture is proportional and graceful.

I would suggest that pretty much every church has a lot of growing to do before it stops making Christ look unattractive. As I watch various people deconstruct their faith these days, I find that the motivating factor is often not something that God did, but something that his people did.

And thus has it ever been.

Next time we’ll continue in this rich passage to see what “mature manhood” looks like more specifically.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

On What You Put into Your Head, Part 3: Toto, We’re Not in Eden Anymore

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Part 1: Strategic Exposure | Part 2: All the Trees of the Garden

While there’s great joy in romping through fields of wildflowers, we know that the pastoral scenes in novels and movies aren’t really accurate. There are ants at the picnic and snakes in the woods. The world is a broken place; it’s really not a good idea to follow my recommendation in the previous post—“learn all you can about everything you can”—without putting some sensible limitations in place.

We’re not in Eden anymore.

How do we decide which trees in the garden to sample?

Many Christians like to use the guidance in Philippians 4.8—

“Finally, brothers,

  • whatever is true,
  • whatever is honorable,
  • whatever is just,
  • whatever is pure,
  • whatever is lovely,
  • whatever is commendable,
  • if there is any excellence,
  • if there is anything worthy of praise,

think about these things.”

I don’t doubt that anyone who focuses his mental faculties on these things will be better for it.

But I note a few things about this list. First, it’s not presented as exhaustive; there’s no command to think only about things on this list. Second, there are times when the Bible itself tells us to think about manifestly negative, even sinful things—to consider the way of the fool, for example. Sometimes it tells us stories that are anything but lovely. And third, I would suggest that because everyone’s different, there are probably even some good things that I shouldn’t dwell on—and you’ll have a similar list, though it’ll probably be different from mine in the particulars.

Why do I say that?

Because the Scripture tells us that we need to make individual adjustments to our mental explorations based on our strengths and weaknesses and our personal characteristics, such as our consciences. Let me give some examples.

Paul says, “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are expedient” (1Co 6.12). In fact, he says it twice (1Co 10.23). What does that mean? It means that some things that others can do freely will not get me toward my goal, will not help me fulfill my purposes. I need to stay focused, give primary attention and time to the things that God has called me to do. For example, I’m called to be a teacher. But I’m fluent only in English. When I teach overseas, I often teach through an interpreter, which means I get in only half the content in the same amount of time. Every time I meet a new language, I’m really tempted to learn it so I don’t have to use an interpreter and can cover more material. But the time it would take for me to learn Kiswahili, or Bemba, or Afrikaans, or Xhosa (and those clicks!), or Mandarin, or Chamorro, or even Spanish, would severely limit the time I can spend on my primary calling, which is studying the material and thinking about the most effective ways to present it. It’s not a profitable use of my time, given the time required to gain fluency. It’s not expedient. It’s better to let someone else do that.

In the first verse in the previous paragraph, Paul also says, “All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.” We’re all prone to give in to the allure of some activity or other—playing video games, watching TV, eating butterscotch sundaes. Most people can handle those activities in a balanced way, but for some it just becomes addictive. I’ve written about my decision to go cold turkey on caffeine. We need to make the firm decision to stay away from otherwise good things that pull us off balance.

In the second verse above, Paul says, “All things are lawful for me, but not all things edify.” Sometimes we have to decide whether something we’re free to do might get in the way of our spiritual growth—or someone else’s. We need to keep our eyes on the prize and set aside weights that keep us from running our best race (He 12.1).

So as we enjoy God’s good gifts, we do so thoughtfully and purposefully, and that means carefully and cautiously.

Be curious! But be careful.

There’s great freedom in that.

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

On What You Put into Your Head, Part 2: All the Trees of the Garden

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Part 1: Strategic Exposure

I noted last time that God gave Adam and Eve free access to all the many trees in the garden, except for just one. God is lavish with his gifts, including his gifts for our thoughtful consideration and even our entertainment. There’s evidence for that all through his Word, and all around us as well.

  • There’s much that glorifies God in the world around us—and beyond it. David, perhaps while watching sheep under a night sky, sang, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork” (Ps 19.1). Just as we learn a lot about a creative person, an artist, by studying his art, so we learn about God by studying his creation—its immensity, its precision, its design, its beauty, its reliability. That means that we ought to study science, at whatever depth we’re equipped to do so.
  • Perhaps you’ve never thought about the fact that the universe has a design language. Its dimensions and proportions and relationships constitute what we call math (or maths, if you’re across the pond). I know a lot of people who don’t like math and didn’t do well in it in school. OK, it’s not for everybody. But math has beauty and order and precision just like the visible universe that it describes, and it declares the glory of God just as certainly.
  • The Bible also tells us that God directs the affairs of peoples and nations, and that the heart of the king is in his hand (Pr 21.1). That means that the outworking of history tells us something about God’s mind—and the better we see how God’s mind works, the better we know him. Providence—history—is well worth thinking about as we seek to glorify God.
  • At the end of the creation week we learn that the last creatures God made—Adam and Eve—he made in his image (Ge 1.26-27). Whatever that means specifically—and there’s a fair amount of debate about that—it means that we resemble God in some significant way or ways. And that means that we can learn about God by studying humans—
    • Their languages
    • Their literature
    • Their art
    • Their music
    • Their speech
    • Their dramatic productions

So the humanities and the arts are places we ought to settle down in and think about.

It’s pretty obvious that I’m talking about the elements of a liberal arts education. No surprise there; I teach at a liberal arts university, where I’ve spent my entire adult life.

I have friends who think college is a waste of money. Learn a trade, they say, and you’ll make more money while avoiding debt.

I think that’s reductionistic. College is just right for some people, and not for others. The trades are honorable employments, and we need people in our society who are good at them. But I shiver at logic that makes earning power the sole criterion for a career decision. And I think we’d all do well to remember that glorifying God calls for a wide variety of people, skills, and knowledge sets. The world is a better place because I’m not an electrician just as certainly as it’s a better place because good electricians exist.

So what’s the big idea?

Romp in as many fields as you like; smell the wildflowers, hear the birdsong, bask in the light and warmth of the sun. Eat from all the trees of the garden to which God has graciously given us access. Delight in what they tell you about his power, his wisdom, his grace. Get to know him better. Seek to become more like his attributes that you see in what you study. Gain knowledge and skills that will make you a better servant in his great plan.

Learn everything you can about everything you can.

Relish the abundant freedom he gives.

Part 3: Toto, We’re Not in Eden Anymore

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

On What You Put into Your Head, Part 1: Strategic Exposure

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I get a sense that our culture doesn’t think much about what it consumes mentally. We scroll through social media posts, slowing down for something that suits our fancy. We scroll through the menus of streaming services, looking for something to watch: something we like, something that looks interesting, something with a cool thumbnail graphic.

Whatever.

But we all know better.

We’ve all had the experience of seeing or hearing something that we wish we could forget; the woods is full of people who desperately want to get old pornographic images out of their minds and just can’t. For all the talk about being unable to remember things, we find that our brains often remember things far better than we’d like. If we had any sense, we’d be a lot more careful about what we put in there.

We’d be purposeful, strategic about it.

Let me share some thoughts about that, something I shared in chapel at Bob Jones University way back on November 6, 2006.

Since what we put into our heads is going to be there forever, and potentially available for recall, we ought to direct our thinking, and even our entertainment, to things that are going to help us become what we want to become and accomplish what we want to accomplish.

I decided a long time ago that the wisest goal for my life was to heed the biblical admonition to “do all to the glory of God” (1Co 10.31). I had discovered that I didn’t have enough mass to be the center of the universe, and what I had experienced of God led me to believe that he would make a wiser investment of my life than anyone or anything else.

And what things would most effectively glorify him?

  • Knowing him: “This is life eternal, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3).
  • Being like him: “We all … are changed into the same image [of the glory of the Lord]” (2 Cor. 3:18); “whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Ro 8.29).
  • Serving him: “That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works” (2Ti 3:17).

So what things can we devote our thinking to that will further these goals?

The Scripture answers this question, as it does many others, with both freedom and caution. On the one hand, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it” (Ps 24.1). God pointed Adam and Eve to a garden full of all different kinds of trees and encouraged them to eat all different kinds of fruit.

Freedom!

But on the other hand, the world is broken and dangerous. There was one tree in the garden that was forbidden to them, and when they violated that prohibition, the whole garden became off limits. There are many things in the world today that we restrict our children from, and if we have any sense, there are things that we restrict ourselves from as well.

Caution.

In the next post I plan to share some observations about thinking with freedom, romping in broad fields of mental wildflowers; in the third post, I’ll have some thoughts about how and when to be cautious.

Part 2: All the Trees of the Garden | Part 3: Toto, We’re Not in Eden Anymore

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

Dealing with Doubt, Part 3: Trusting Your Friends

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Part 1: The Joy of Doubting | Part 2: The Limits of Logic

So far in this series we’ve noted that doubt is a normal part of maturing and that while we should use logic as a useful tool for the discovery of truth about things we doubt, it cannot function as an absolute authority. This time I’d like to suggest an approach to dealing with those situations where logic runs out of gas. This principled approach is an important enough concept that I’m including it here as a conclusion to this series even though I’ve alluded to it before.

Let me expand on an illustration from Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology.

Suppose I come home from work early one day. I pull into the driveway, and there’s a car there that I don’t recognize. I get out of my car and, when I close the door, a man I don’t recognize emerges from the front door and onto the porch. He’s tall, good-looking, and of course has a full head of thick, glorious hair.

When he sees me, he looks horrified. He runs to his car, fires it up, and squeals the tires as he speeds away.

Now.

What am I going to think?

Actually, it depends.

On what?

It depends on how my wife and I are getting along these days.

If our relationship is healthy, we’re talking, solving problems together, sharing goals—in other words, there are no suppressed pathologies in the relationship—then I’m going to assume that there’s a reasonable explanation for what just happened, that there’s simply something I don’t know that would make it all make sense.

If it happens in early September, I might think, “Hey, my birthday is coming up. I bet she’s planning a surprise party, and he’s the party planner. I’ll have to be sure to act surprised when it happens, so I don’t disappoint her after all that work—because I want her to enjoy the party just as much as I do.”

But if our marriage is in trouble, my thoughts are going to go in a considerably darker direction.

When someone in a relationship with us does something inexplicable, then what we think about that action depends pretty much entirely on how healthy the relationship is. If we trust him, we assume there’s a good explanation. If we don’t, we don’t.

How would you like to be in a marriage where—let’s look at it from the wife’s perspective—your husband comes home and checks the odometer in your car to see whether you’re putting more miles on it than you can account for? Where he grills you about where you’ve been? Every day?

I’d suggest that that’s not a marriage. It’s stalking.

No one wants to live like that.

A husband ought to trust his wife, because he knows her, and because their relationship is in good shape. That’s not being naïve or credulous; it’s being emotionally and socially healthy.

If your immediate thought when God puzzles you is that he doesn’t care about you, or that he’s evil, or that he doesn’t even exist, then it’s time to invest some time and energy in the relationship. Before you make any life-changing decisions—before you deconstruct—you need to give the relationship a chance. That’s how healthy relationships work.

In the case of your relationship with God, that means giving attention to the means of grace, going to the spiritual gym and working out. It means getting into the Word, seeking answers that apply right now to this question that’s troubling you. It means meditating on passages that delineate God’s character and thus present a logical—yes, logical—response to the thing he’s done that puzzles you.

I’ve found that the most impactful way to meditate on the Scripture is to memorize it. But everybody’s different; you may find that other kinds of interaction with the Scripture and prayer and fellowship are more effective for you. That’s great. Go for it.

But give the relationship a chance. Make sure it’s healthy.

You’d do the same for your friends. How much more should you exercise care for your relationship with your Creator, the Lover of your soul?

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Dealing with Doubt, Part 2: The Limits of Logic

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Part 1: The Joy of Doubting

One of the main reasons that Christians wrestle with doubts these days is that they bump into something that doesn’t seem to make sense.

  • Jesus is a human teacher, but he’s also God? How does that work? How can he not know something (Mk 13.32) if he’s omniscient? How do you not know something you know?
  • Why did God have to kill his Son, when his Son didn’t even do anything wrong? Why couldn’t God just forgive us—the way he’s told us to forgive others?
  • If God is great and good, why is there suffering? Isn’t he able to stop the suffering? Doesn’t he want to?

We’re struggling with a simple problem here—none of us is as smart as we think we are.

Come on; you know that’s true. Even if you don’t admit it for yourself, you see it easily in everyone around you. What’s the likelihood that you’re the only exception? :-)

Our minds are wonderful things, wonderful gifts from God that enable us to discover truth. But they are not ultimate authorities—in fact, they couldn’t possibly be, given that no two human minds come to all the same conclusions. That may be more obvious in the current polarized culture than ever before. Everybody’s wrong about something; and if there were one exception to that rule, we would have no reliable way to determine who it was.

Rationalism, then, is self-defeating.

Reason, like all of God’s other gracious gifts, is great, but it makes a lousy god.

Paul tells us that “The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1Co 1.25). In other words, on his worst day, God is better than the best of us on our best day in both wisdom and strength.

And God doesn’t have any bad days.

This simple fact yields at least three consequences. I’ll note the first two in this post.

First, arguments raised against God are predominantly weak.

I’ve commented before on the weakness of most charges of contradiction in the Scripture. I’ll confess that I find it difficult not to shake my head when I hear yet another young scholar repeat as breaking news the old allegation that the Bible is “filled with contradictions.” Those who can supply an example or two when asked—and that’s a minority—typically raise objections that are just laughable, such as the biblical comments that God is both a God of peace and a God of war (that’s a round character, and the same young scholars love them when they show up in popular movies), or that Leviticus calls bats birds (it doesn’t).

I’m not saying that there aren’t tough questions; there certainly are, and I’ll get to them in a moment. But it’s remarkable to me how many bright people who view logic as the greatest authority don’t see the logical problems in their own charges against the Scripture.

Second, because our minds aren’t good at understanding infinity, which is an essential attribute of God, we’re often going to run into things that puzzle us—things that we’re not mentally equipped to comprehend.

Let me note something simple about this phenomenon.

It’s exactly what we should expect if there’s really an infinite God.

A common critical view is that religion is something that evolving humans developed in an attempt to make sense of the world, and probably to give themselves power over rival tribes. The Bible, like all other holy books, is just folk tales, interesting in the study of the history of religions but not true, and most certainly not authoritative.

But that doesn’t square with the data.

If we had made this god up, would we have included things that we can’t figure out? things that would encourage rationalists to reject such a god altogether? On the other hand, if such a God really exists, wouldn’t we expect that he would regularly step beyond the horizon of our understanding and leave us shaking our heads in puzzlement?

I would submit that the existence of these perplexities is a feature, not a bug. This is a reassuring thing, not something that should lead to apostasy.

There’s more to be said. Next time.

Part 3: Trusting Your Friends

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

On Valentine’s Day

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This a time for romance. For love. For commitment. For loyalty.

Interestingly, God describes his relationship with his people in those terms.

We know that “God is love” (1Jn 4.8, 16)—that he has always been in relationship among the persons of the Godhead; he has never been alone. Love is natural for him; it’s part of who he is.

We know that “we love him because he first loved us” (1Jn 4.19)—that he initiated the relationship with us, even though we had wronged him (Ro 3.23). In fact, he lovingly anticipated that relationship before we even existed—before the earth itself existed (Ep 1.4).

We know that his most oft-repeated description of himself includes “lovingkindness” (Heb hesed), a far-reaching word not captured by any single English word, but including loving loyalty to a covenant relationship. It’s the attribute that keeps 60-year marriages together in spite of everything.

That’s the kind of relationship God wants with us.

We can imagine, then, how our sin must grieve his heart. In fact, he describes the sin of his people as adultery, violation of the marriage relationship.

I’ve been a believer for more than 60 years. Every day of those 60 years, I have fallen short of the glory of God. I’ve been unfaithful to the relationship.

That’s over 22,000 days of adultery.

How many would it take for you to give up on your spouse?

Yet God continues to welcome us back, to forgive our unfaithfulness, to restore the relationship.

Hesed.

God illustrates his love for us in a couple of stories he tells his people. One is in the book of Hosea, where he tells the prophet to marry a woman who will be unfaithful to him—as Israel has been unfaithful to their God.

It’s heartbreaking.

There’s another story, a less-well-known one, in Ezekiel 16.

Ezekiel is writing long after Hosea—so long, in fact, that Judah has now gone into captivity in Babylon, and Ezekiel is prophesying to them in the Jewish community there. He speaks God’s words to the community—

  • One day God found an abandoned baby by the side of the road, newborn, unwashed, unwanted. He took her home and cleaned her up, and then he began to provide for her needs: food, clothing, shelter. For years he raised her—lavishly—as his own daughter.
  • When she became an adult, a beautiful woman, his love for her led him to take her as his wife.
  • But she was unfaithful. She went after other lovers, not merely being seduced by them but seducing them, and aggressively. She pressured them; she even paid them. She made Sodom seem mild by comparison. She broke his heart.

What a horrifying account.

But it doesn’t end in divorce, or retaliation, or expulsion, or murder, or any of the things we would expect from a human relationship of this sort.

It ends in restoration, reunification, love.

And not because the unfaithful wife pleads for forgiveness.

Because the maltreated Husband remembers and is faithful to the marriage covenant, to the permanence of the relationship:

60 Nevertheless, I will remember My covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you. 61 … . 62 Thus I will establish My covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord (Ezk 16.60, 62).

O wondrous love that will not let me go,
I cling to You with all my strength and soul;
Yet if my hold should ever fail
This wondrous love will never let me go!
(Steve and Vikki Cook)

Happy Valentine’s Day.

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Dealing with Doubt, Part 1: The Joy of Doubting

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Do you ever doubt your beliefs?

The fact is that we all do. We doubt the little things, and sometimes we doubt the big things. The really, really big things.

I’ve written before about an experience I had while in seminary, when I doubted the Biggest Thing Ever—whether there’s a God, and whether any of this is true.

Doubt is an important part of growing up. There comes a time in our maturation when we have to move beyond “that’s what I’ve always been taught” to “this is what I believe, for myself, with conviction; here I stand; I can do no other.” If you never do this, you essentially remain a child, at the mercy of those who want you to remain a child even though you’re an adult. And that, my friend, is profoundly unhealthy. Such a relationship is inevitably going to become abusive.

I deal with college students all day long. College age—whether you go to college or not—is the time when we transition into adulthood, when we ask hard questions about what we’ve always been taught and come to personal convictions about what we believe and how we will live. It’s the right time to work through those issues. Adulthood awaits.

But asking those questions can be scary. Where will I come out? Is there light at the end of the tunnel? For some people, the tunnel is darker than for others, and it can generate a fair amount of fear. When I was doubting—when I didn’t know how it would all turn out—I was deeply unsettled.

But I can say most assuredly that I am better for having doubted, for having gone through the unsettling experience. One reason is that beliefs that are never tested are never proved. Another reason is that working out your convictions makes them, and you, stronger. Yet another reason is that I have stories to encourage younger brothers and sisters who are now in that growth process. I’m profoundly grateful that I have had, and progressed through, that period of doubt.

Something I learned from the experience is that in thinking through what we’ve been taught, we’re often biased toward rejecting it, for several reasons.

  • Familiarity breeds contempt, even when the contempt is undeserved. Add to that the fact that you know where the bodies are buried in the landscape of your life: you’ve seen sin and failure and hypocrisy in people who participated in your upbringing—parents, siblings, teachers, pastors. That’s the inevitable result of living in a broken world, but it nonetheless inclines you to reject where you came from. The problem is that there may well be a baby in that bathwater.
  • The grass seems greener on the other side of the fence. There’s as much imperfection over there as you experienced in your upbringing—it’s a broken world, remember—but you haven’t experienced that, and everything looks fresh and new and exciting over there.
  • I’ve used trite maxims in the previous two points, so I’ll avoid that on this one. We live in an increasingly unstable culture. The pace of cultural philosophy, like the news cycle, is accelerating, and there’s considerable social pressure to throw out the old and embrace the new. If you toss it all, you’ll get instant affirmation and support from many quarters.

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t throw out some of the things we were taught. In fact, by saying that we live in a broken world, I’ve implied just the opposite. I was taught things that I haven’t retained as an adult, and undoubtedly we all should have a similar experience. But I am saying that as you make those decisions, good and necessary decisions, you’ll be inclined to throw out things that you shouldn’t. You need to proceed carefully, thoughtfully, intentionally, rather than just chucking everything.

As I walked that path, I learned some principles that I found helpful in evaluating what to keep and what to toss. I’d like to take a few posts to share them with you.

Part 2: The Limits of Logic | Part 3: Trusting Your Friends

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Incomprehensible Faith

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In my Bible study plan I’m always doing a deep dive on a section of Scripture. For the first three months of this year, I’m studying Ruth. I return to the book every day, studying it from multiple perspectives and reading. A lot.

A few days ago I thought of something that I’d never noticed before, after all these years of hearing and reading the story dozens of times. It’s something about the first major incident in the book.

We all know the story. Naomi and her husband move from Bethlehem—the house of bread—to Moab because of a famine. Their two sons marry Moabite women, and then all three men die. In the culture of that day, a childless widow is in very serious danger of starving to death. Naomi hears that the famine is over back in Bethlehem and decides to return—likely because she has family there who will be legally obligated to help her.

So far the story is pretty simple. But it’s complicated by the fact that one of her Moabite daughters-in-law, Ruth, wants to return with her.

Naomi argues against it, citing the obvious practical fact that Ruth is more likely to find a second husband in her own land. Naomi doesn’t mention the fact that the Moabites and the Israelites are enemies; the king of Moab had hired the prophet Balaam to curse Israel (Nu 22.4-5), and God had consequently cursed the king and his people (Nu 24.17). Surely Ruth’s marital prospects would be better in Moab.

But Ruth insists. She will go with Naomi; she will live with Naomi; she will adopt her people and culture; and she will worship her God (Ru 1.16)—for the rest of her life (Ru 1.17).

Why?

Look at this from Ruth’s perspective. The conventional wisdom in her day is that every ethnic group has its own god. Chemosh is the god of the Moabites—and their harvests are so plentiful that Yahweh’s people are coming over there to get a piece of the action. In all of Ruth’s experience to this point, she has seen nothing that would convince her that Yahweh cares for his people, or even that he is good. His people are starving, so Chemosh feeds them. Her father-in-law dies in Moab, as do his two sons, including Ruth’s husband, and all of them allegedly under the care of this tribal god Yahweh—who, to make matters worse, has placed her and her people under a specific curse.

Why seek shelter under the wings of such a god? What has he ever done for his own people, let alone an enemy?

Was it Naomi’s love for and trust in her own god? Well, she believes that her god, Yahweh, has taken someone who was full and has left her empty. A few days from now she will tell her own people no longer to call her by her name, Naomi, which means “pleasant.” Instead, she will say, call me Mara—“bitter.” My god has not been good to me.

So why does Ruth go with Naomi? And especially, why does she seek to worship Naomi’s god?

Well, for all her imperfections, Naomi does recognize that God is in charge. (And here I begin to capitalize the word again.) It is he who has brought food back to Bethlehem (Ru 1.6). It is he, not Chemosh, who she confidently believes will prosper the lives of her daughters-in-law (Ru 1.8-9). Even though his hand has gone out against her (Ru 1.13), she still believes that he is strong enough to bless, and she prays that he will. You don’t pray to someone you don’t believe in.

Apparently, Ruth sees in Naomi’s imperfect faith something greater than what she sees in the worshippers of her tribal god. For all of the trouble, for all of the pain, this is a God worth following—even at the cost of leaving home, family, culture, and language to go to a land where you’re under a curse, where you will likely face deep, overt, and lifelong discrimination.

So she goes.

And she finds that her faith is richly rewarded. This Yahweh, she finds, does indeed direct circumstances, even down to the portion of the community field where she happens to go looking for loose grain lying on the ground or standing beyond the reaches of the reapers’ sickles around the edges.

This is a God worth trusting. Worth following.

No matter what.

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 5: Closing Thoughts

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Omnipotence | Part 3: Omniscience | Part 4: TLC

There are other things we learn about the Creator by observing his creation. I’ve written before about a number of implications from the fact that God is our Creator. Here I’ll mention a couple of related thoughts in closing.

First, we know almost instinctively that when someone makes something, he gets to decide what to do with it. My father was skilled with his hands, and when I was a boy he made a workbench that he intended to use for working on automobile engines. The surface consisted of a long row of 2 x 4 beams turned sideways, so that the tabletop was 4” thick. As it turned out, I don’t remember him ever using it to work on engines; he did other things with it. He’s allowed to do that. It’s his table; he made it.

Similarly, the Creator has the right to govern his creation. We call that sovereignty. What he says goes.

Now, we’ve already established that he is powerful—able to do what he decides to do—and wise—able to determine the most effective uses of what he has created. We’ve also noted that he’s good; he doesn’t abuse any element of his creation, most especially us, but rather cares for us. I’ve written elsewhere about that fact that everything we really need is free.

All this means that his sovereignty over creation is no threat to us—unless we foolishly decide that we know better than he does. And unfortunately, the tendency to do that is part of our fallen nature.

A second thought derives naturally from the first. We ought to respect the Creator’s wisdom and follow his direction. Again, I’ve developed this idea elsewhere. You can use a chainsaw any old way you like, but if you reject the engineer’s recommendations for safe and proper use, don’t be surprised if you end up getting hurt.

Some years ago I recall seeing a commercial for Sherwin-Williams paint. The video began with a shot of the space shuttle on the launch pad, with a voiceover saying, “Sherwin Williams designed the paint for the space shuttle.” Then you heard the countdown, and at “Liftoff!” the screen went white as the exhaust from the solid rocket boosters obliterated the view of everything else, and the roar of those engines drowned out the voice. Then the image changed to a different kind of white, and as the camera zoomed out, you realized you were looking at a door. It opened away from you, and you saw a typical residential bathroom. Against the quiet, the voiceover said, “Chances are we can handle your bathroom.”

When I consider God’s heavens, the work of his fingers, I am driven to a simple confidence. He can handle my life: needs, wants, questions, doubts, sins, perplexities, griefs, all of it. I can trust his wisdom, his power, his goodness, for all that lies ahead, just as for all that he has brought me graciously through.

And, by his grace, I will.

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash